Two to Five Weeks Left

I was watching some people on a stage, who were announcing that they were going to begin a performance. One man said that he would be playing the part of the platypus.

After the opening announcement had been made, there were four humanoid forms with different animal heads on them. The heads were such that they did not look like masks worn over one's head, they looked a bit smaller. I don't know if one was a platypus or not, but there was definitely a lizard head.

As I became more lucid, the audience started to get more chaotic. People were kind of running around in the audience, and it became a whirlwind. I stood back and watched as the whirlwind in the large, open auditorium began to solidify into a different setting... a series of identically-sized connected rooms, all laid out the same. It was like a pattern inside an office building where each room had the same desk, the same filing cabinet, etc. The rooms alternated in a checkered pattern with certain items in adjacent rooms (ledger books, for instance) being red or blue.

I tried to remain calm as I darted from one empty room to another, with no seeming exit. In looking at some of the writing on the ledgers I saw it seemed to be just detailing some personal notes, and I began to imagine that each of these rooms was some kind of representation of the tracking of the actions of every living thing in the Universe. For a moment, I felt like I was a lone roleplayer, who was like Speedy Gonzalez playing ping-pong with himself...except running room to room making notes on what each person, spider, rock, etc. was doing.

After calling out for a computer, I did run into some kind of automated computing agent. It was on a screen, and asking me questions like a ship's computer might in a Sci-Fi movie. However, when I talked to it a little bit, it was giving somewhat scripted responses...like out of a child's video game, unrelated to anything I was doing. I looked on the corner of the screen and saw it was something kind of game-ish, branded with the Nickelodeon orange "splot" logo.

me: (to computer) "That... is not what I had in mind. I was thinking something that could actually help."

But it did seem to have kicked me out of the uniformity of the office rooms. Seeing a way out, I managed to move along the wall the screen had been on toward some areas where there were people. There was a kind of a foyer, with a reception desk and a woman seated behind it. There were some doors opening into an outside landscape, with a kind of barren desert appearance and a very blue sky. To the left and the right of the double doors there were wings of rooms behind doors, with names like "Dave's Wing" or "Joe's Wing". There were some people seated in a row, and what looked like snack stations or coffee stations of some kind.

Around this time I got an impression of some kind of movie, that was based on a Philip K. Dick book called "Mine". It wasn't clear if I saw this movie on a screen, or quite how I experienced it. But the opening scene had a narrator speaking about how aliens had been attacking from space, but they didn't need to fly in ships. They were themselves ships; a bit like transformers, and as they came into the ground they were very agile and relentless at dodging attacks. I saw this in an immersive 3-D experience but then kind of popped back to the foyer.

Realizing that the screen in the foyer was actually an interactive assistant to help you find things, I started asking it questions. Everything I said it transcribed wrong, and I kept trying to go back but it didn't understand what I was asking so it would kept searching for things like "go back" literally. Eventually I asked it to search for information on a Philip K. Dick story called "Mine".

This didn't get any hits. I wound up running into some people who were talking about a group that had cured Malaria. There was talk about a Red Conference, which was sponsored by The Rebol Foundation.

Note
Rebol and Red are programming languages I work with/on.

Running into some people from the conference, I tried to talk with them...but a small child attacked me.

me: "Aaargh! Help! Get him off me!"

conference man: "So...these days, there's really nothing you can do. They changed the laws, and everyone is expected to take care of there own defenses. It's gotten to where it's no longer illegal to force sex with whoever you want, or stab whoever you want with a knife. The game has changed."

I fought for a while, but lost, then found myself in a different situation going up a stairway. At the top of the stairway I could see a gathering of people, but between me and them was a traffic cone in the center and some yellow "do not cross tape" that was strung across it.

Rather than draw attention by jumping the line, I turned around to the left to see where the path had intended to take me. It seemed to be going to the same place, just a little more circuitously. As I did I began walking and talking to a friendly seeming guy, about something I don't recall. But I became rather a mess as various things I had began to fall...my pants fell down and I was trying to grab my belt. My shoes and socks were no longer on my feet but on the ground behind me. I was tripping and couldn't stand up quite straight.

An older military-looking man walked up behind me, and observed this.

military man: "Looks like you've got a problem. What's that... six problems."

My wallet or some other thing fell on the floor.

military man: "And now you have seven problems. Manuel, would you please help this customer?"

The man I had been talking to before looked a bit glum, and addressed me.

Manuel: "You aren't going to like this answer, but I'm going to need to give you some more drugs."

me: "You mean, the injection stuff that keeps pushing me back into waking up? Couldn't you do something to help me, right here?"

manuel: (thinking) "You're at a phase where technically, yes, we could help you and probably figure out some kind of therapy. But consider it a parallel to delivering a premature baby. It probably would work out; but then you have to put the baby in a machine...and hook it up to tubes and such. Then maybe it needs special care and monitoring, at winds up being a lot of time and effort and unnecessary risk. So if you can delay the birth until the baby is viable on its own, that works out better for everyone...baby included."

me: "How long do I have to wait?"

Another man looked at me and interjected.

other man: "From the look of it, I'd say about two weeks."

Manuel: (angry) "Don't tell him that! It's hard to say exactly. Could be two weeks, could be five weeks?"

me: "Until what?"

Manuel: (smirking) "Until you become a full member of the club of timeless glorious rock stars of the universe."

me: "Hmmm. Do I have to do anything?"

Manuel: "You shouldn't have to."

The scene shifted and I was groggily walking through a somewhat more grim environment. Not exactly sure how, I had a handful of syringes in my hand and a plastic bag. The syringes seemed to have been used and had a brownish residue. No one seemed to notice me, and I had an instinctual feeling that I was in an area I wasn't supposed to be. There were little carousels of these needle bags, each with a needle in it, which had been numbered with a sharpie (e.g. #7, #12).

I took the syringes and put them into the bag, and looked at myself to notice a sticker or something identifying me as #18. I located a Sharpie and wrote "#18" on the bag and filed it into the carousel.

Note
I had a vague feeling that what I had done was to place a bag into a used medication logging facility. By performing the act I did, I was indicating that an unreasonable amount of this medication had been given to me. I do not know if this was an act of accuracy (e.g. I had managed to collect all those needles which had been used on me) or if I had found the needles elsewhere and was otherwise pushing a form of documentation into the system that more of the medication was being used than being reported.

Currently I am experimenting with using Disqus for comments, however it is configured that you don't have to log in or tie it to an account. Simply check the "I'd rather post as a guest" button after clicking in the spot to type in a name.

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the
words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction
—in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to
be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be
crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less
disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?